National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE)

Abstract:

In the continuation of the Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa (http://www.sci-gaia.eu) the National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE, https://nadreweb.ethernet.edu.et) has been designed. NADRE is one of the very first Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reproduceable (FAIR) compliant digital repositories in Africa. It supports all most widely adopted bibliographic standards and it has been included in several very known registries of Open Access archives in the world, hence increasing the visibility of Ethiopian researchers as well as their research outputs.

However, what really makes the NADRE a success story both at national and continental level is its holistic approach to bridging the gap between research done in Ethiopia (and hopefully other Africa countries in the future) and in the rest of the world and the consequent impact had so far. In fact, the NADRE is not only a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) that exploits bleeding-edge software technologies for standard-based digital archives but it also, and more importantly, (i) triggered the establishment in Ethiopia for the first time ever of a national Open Access Policy and (ii) its governance and leadership model is meant to involve all the actors and stakeholders of research and higher education in the country.

For the above reasons, we deem the NADRE experience relevant and important to be shared with other organisations in other African countries, which could benefit from it. All the software as well as all the training materials that have developed to show users how to use the repository are indeed released under open licenses for maximum and easy reuse.